Day 2

The song has been moving along in bits and pieces, first figuring out the proper notes, then the right rhythms, and finally synchronizing the bass line, drum beats, and harmony for the second repeat. The quad notes have been harder to figure out, but Dev and I worked out most of the percussion section by beating it together in Physics. The majority of the notes for the bass line were figured out and tabbed by using the piano app on my iPod to find the tone, then scribbling it down on scratch paper. The final steps for our group will be to assign the different parts to each different instrument, and then recording the notes using finale on Mr. Matthy’s computer and keyboard.

-Phillip

Furthermore, we were able to figure out the bass drum and snare drum parts for the song. When we were listening to the actual song to figure out the drum lines we were having difficulty because there was so much going on. We found this awesome instrumental on YouTube that helped us a lot because the individual parts were a lot easier to listen for once the rapping was taken off. We even noticed some extra parts in the instrumental, such as sirens and a mind-blowing electric guitar part, so we are looking to incorporate those into our transposition!

-Irene

Today was a learning experience for the three of us. Coming up with the melody on the piano (Day One’s work) was easy, and we expected to be able to cruise through this project. As we found out today, this will absolutely NOT be the case. As we started to transpose the melodies we wrote out for each instrument, we were faced by several decisions. First of all, we had to decide which instrument plays which part. We decided to write 3 parts (a bass line, a tenor line and a “melody” line and then just divide them by instrument – ie: Trumpets/Flutes/Clarinets play melody line and so on. After inputting a melody line and a bass line into Finale 2011, we moved on to the drum line. To get a better sense of what we were trying to replicate, we looked up an instrumental version of “Power” on YouTube. We discovered several nuances that were not apparent to us in the song version (most notably a siren and an electric guitar solo). Transcribing these parts along with the drum beat is quite difficult and still a work in progress.

-Dev